The story follows Dr. Herbert Bock (Scott), the brilliant but disillusioned and suicidal Chief of Medicine at a chaotic Manhattan teaching hospital. Bock is dealing with a monumental mid-life crisis, impotence, and an estranged family, all while the hospital around him collapses into madness.
: The script highlights the friction between Bock’s "traditional" system and the subversive, "flower child" counterculture of the 1970s.
: The film portrays the hospital as a site of bureaucratic absurdity where operations are performed on the wrong patients and medical staff are dying under mysterious circumstances.
: As Barbara Drummond, Rigg provides a romantic—if cynical—counterpoint to Scott, notably in a celebrated seduction monologue that shifts the film’s tone in the middle third.